Watch Me Paint: World-Class Art, World-Class Instruction
The Concert by Johannes Vermeer was one of 13 pieces, worth $300 million, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990. This was the largest art heist in history and remains one of the great mysteries of the art world. I came across this factoid in a dumb novel recently: art …
A Dyngus Day dousing. Today has the makings of a party: Lent is finally over and it’s supposed to be fine, with temperatures in the 70s. Most of the detritus from the family Easter dinner is cleared away. If I were still in my hometown of Buffalo, NY, I would go over to the East …
Winter lambing, underpainting, by little ol’ me. If you were properly brought up on James Herriot, you know that a late winter blizzard can play havoc with lambing. This is not just an historical oddity; last spring a mid-April blizzard in Northern Ireland killed 17,000 lambs and sheep. Cold is not their only enemy. Weak …
Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant is a beautiful, difficult work that would not have been possible before the modern era. One of my children works with severely handicapped adults. His duties include stopping clients from smearing feces on the walls. These non-verbal, intellectually-broken adults share a means of communication with some of the more rarified intellects in …
I asked four of my summer workshop students how they’re coping with this unusually cold winter, and what they’re working on. SUE LEO “My typography class all semester long thought the angry feminist featured in the movie Helvetica was absurd, as she blamed all the wars and strife in life on this typeface. There are …
Pastoral window in Second Presbyterian Church, Chicago, IL, installed 1917. Too bad Tiffany was an artisan, not an artist, right? Luckily for him, he could have bought his way into SoHo several times over. Only a Philistine could doubt that New York is the center of the art world, but I have to admit there …
“This was the first window I did,” said Gowing. “The window represents Holy Communion with grapes standing in for wine, and to my delight, John found glass that looked just like matzoh, the original communion bread. He painted in the air holes and edges. To date, John still hasn’t ever seen a matzoh in person, …
Sir Joshua Reynolds painted himself as a man of letters, in his robes as a Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford (1776). Note the absolute absence of any paint on that outfit. Prior to the middle of the 18th century, fine artists were considered craftsmen. While they may have been very successful and well-paid, they …
William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805). This is what conceptual art used to be about. The Daily Mail reportedthat a young British art student plans to have sex in a public gallery for a project entitled Art School Stole My Virginity. It’s both sad and quaint that he imagines there’s …
Continue reading “I don’t object because it cheapens sex, but because it cheapens art.”
Cigarette Butts, 2013. Depicts 139,000 cigarette butts, equal to the number of cigarettes that are smoked and discarded every 15 seconds in the US. Running the Numbers is a series of digital montages by artist Chris Jordan that looks at American culture in terms of raw numbers. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something …